With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.

Not unlike the vulgar herd here.

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.

Come on, who would really go that far?

In general, therefore, color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.

Come on, who would really go that far?

The joy of life consists in the inevitable, continual triumph of new values.

No, not including you, Mr. Objectivist.

Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.

Obviously: Things artists say.

The eyes are hammers.

What's that make the ears then?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Once you've seen how broken someone is it's like seeing them naked—you can't look at them the same anymore.

Unless perhaps it's you that broke them.

Intentions always look better on paper than in reality.

For one thing, there are likely to be less consequences.

People like us in situations like this become hashtags, but they rarely get justice. I think we all wait for that one time though, that one time when it ends right.

Just out of curiosity, what's our hashtag here?

Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated.

And then the rage passed down by black mothers to their daughters.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.

Artistspeak let's call it.

It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

Sounds like something Jacob might say here. He said in jest.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Not unlike the beast.

When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?

Unless of course we do in fact live in a wholly determined universe.

How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it, who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labor that disposes me in his favor, it is - it can only be - the vigor of his protest against it.

Not much of that is still going around of course.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

My guess: on his terms.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Never tell. Not if you love your wife...In fact, if your old lady walks in on you deny it. Yeah. Just flat out and she'll believe it: "I'm tellin' ya. This chick came downstairs with a sign around her neck 'Lay On Top Of Me Or I'll Die.' " I didn't know what I was goin' to do.

What a comedian!

If something about the human body disgusts you, the fault lies with the manufacturer.

Part of the kick of making people laugh was doing something different. We were a rare breed --- spotting one of us was like pinning a space alien, or abdominal snowman. There were maybe a hundred stand-ups in the whole country when I was doing it.

Now in some places there are a hundred on any given block,

If I just stuck to pot I might have found out what a drag being an aging hipster actually was.

It just wasn't meant to be.

The only truly anonymous donor is the guy who knocks up your daughter.

Let's just hope it's not your son.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

One odd thing about the current debate between religious people and atheists is that the participants don't seem to care that they entirely fail to communicate with the other side. They therefore have no account of why the religious or the atheists believe what they do, except that they are stupid or deluded. I think philosophers should try and make sense of their disputes with their opponents as far as possible without treating them as idiots. This applies to the religious participants in the debate as much as to the atheists.

Of course we're far too mature for that here.

Many people like to think that their moral or political enemies are not just wicked or wrong - as if that were not enough - but stupid or idiotic too.

Of course we're far too mature for that here.

I like to think of myself as a naturalist - insofar as that term is at all clear.

Like any of the terms we use here are.

I do think it's important to distinguish between intentionalism about consciousness and externalism about consciousness. Intentionalism says that consciousness is a form of intentionality - the representation of things to the mind. Externalism says that these things have to exist in order for them to be represented, or presented. These are different views.

And that's before -- well before for some -- we bring them down to earth.

I do not claim to have any developed or sophisticated views in political philosophy, but I think that one of the lessons of the last few hundred years of history is that the greatest threat to human prosperity and well-being is fanaticism and intolerance, even in the name of apparently laudable goals.

Not true at all, is it, Mr. Objectivist?

The thing I think I have learned from Wittgenstein is the importance of not making things up: philosophers should not invent problems, and they should also be conscious of the risk of inventing pointless 'technical' machinery which do not offer real explanations, but often just re-state the known facts in a more complex way.

Cue, among others, Mr. Durant's epistemologists. Here for example.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are.

Sounds like something that has never actually been proven.

The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth at its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths becomes tomorrow's disproven hypotheses of forgotten objet d'arts.

Sound familiar?

Be careful of averages and how they’re applied. One way that they can fool you is if the average combines samples from disparate populations. This can lead to absurd observations such as: "On average, humans have one testicle.”

Well, that is true.

The amount of scientific information we’ve discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.

Imagine then twenty years into the future.

No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

Right, like that's what it makes us.

A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine.

Almost as though it has no choice.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.

Ah, the objectivist mind. Especially when it's in the head of a dictator.

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

And that means mine, yours or theirs.

The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.

Make of this what this what you will.

The Soviets, at least some of them, believed in what they were doing. After all, they did it themselves and recorded what they did, in clear language, in official documents, filed in orderly archives. They could associate themselves with their deeds, because true responsibility rested with the communist party. The Nazis used grand phrases of racial superiority, and Himmler spoke of the moral sublimity involved in killing others for the sake of the race. But when the time came, Germans acted without plans and without precision, and with no sense of responsibility. In the Nazi worldview, what happened was simply what happened, the stronger should win; but nothing was certain, and certainly not the relationship between past, present and future. The Soviets believed that History was on their side and acted accordingly. The Nazis were afraid of everything except the disorder they themselves created. The systems and the mentalities were different, profoundly and interestingly so.

Definitely make of this what this what you will.

All citizens do have a measure of control, at least in democracies where their votes are counted, of how they belong to their nations.

Some considerably more measurable than others.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

So, what do you think, for better or for worse?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Hemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your hemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

Go ahead, point that out to them.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

The Bible says that it’s all right to cast the first stone if someone dead is telling you to do it.

We'll need the chapter and verse of course.

Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.

Why is this probably true?

If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, "Hello." This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I'd walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians. Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I'm more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people.

These things can get tricky.

If practiced correctly, generosity can induce feelings of shame, inadequacy, and even envy, to name just a few.

Imagine then practicing it incorrectly.

To spend your days in the company of naked men - that was the life for me.

For others of course it's naked women.

Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face. Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

He means almost nothing.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

One day in Berlin ... Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right.

I like it myself, sure, but, come on.

Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd was the first person in rock I had seen with makeup on. He wore black nail polish and lots of mascara and black eye shadow, and he was so mysterious. It was this androgynous thing I found absolutely fascinating.

The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

Let alone objectively.

I want people to hear musicians like Joe Cuba. He has done things to whole masses of Puerto Rican people. The music is fantastic and important.

No doubt about it, we’re smarter than every other living creature that ever ran, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that?

And does that even matter?

…I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon, than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who–or what–is actually in charge.

It's still God, right?

What we know is that the matter we have come to love in the universe—the stuff of stars, planets, and life—is only a light frosting on the cosmic cake, modest buoys afloat in a vast cosmic ocean of something that looks like nothing.

And then you die.

With only one proton in its nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest and simplest element, made entirely during the big bang. Out of the ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system.

And then there's the hydrogen bomb.

To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that’s hard to do, then maybe it’s easier if you imagine stuffing about a billion elephants into a Chapstick casing.

Apparently, there things actually do exist.

...the universe expands forever in every direction for all of time...

Here's the part I still don't get: If the universe is all there is, what is it expanding into?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.

You don't get this, do you?

If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.

So, has that actually worked for you?

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Of course the more you know what you want, you more painful it is not getting it.

Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.

If only because they don't seem to know themselves.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

Time to get out my stopwatch, he mused.

There's a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true but you haven't told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet.

Me, I don't have anyone to tell. So sometimes it's really quiet.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Quote me as much as you like; as a matter of fact I don’t even mind if you misquote me!

Sure, go ahead, misquote me too.

Speaking of nudes, I have always had a great fondness for this subject, both in my paintings and in my photos, and I must admit, not for purely artistic reasons.

Like we didn't know that.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

We still do.

All critics should be assassinated.

Starting now? Or starting here?

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.

Talk about a world of words.

In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion.

And what spirit might that be?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

You can never represent yourself totally .... to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.

Not totally, but, here, just enough to know the "real me".

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

Not counting all that apriori stuff.

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

For some of course that means [and only means] me, myself and I.

You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.

Until death do you part.

How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation.

Okay, but what might that cost?

If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I'm a little more respectful of ants.

How close is this to being irrational?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

People say misery loves company, but I think it’s like that with anger too.

Well, it is here anyway.

A hairbrush is not a gun.

Not that in particular contexts it can't look like one.

I hope none of them ask about my spring break. They went to Taipei, the Bahamas, Harry Potter World. I stayed in the hood and saw a cop kill my friend.

Back again to that hairbrush.

Right. Lack of opportunities, Daddy says. Corporate America don't bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain't quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don't prepare us well enough. That's why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don't get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It's easier to find some crack that it is the find a good school around here.Now, think 'bout this, he says. How did the drugs even get in our neighborhood? This is a multibillion-dollar industry we talking 'bout, baby. That shit is flown into our communities, but I don't know anybody with a private jet. Do you?No.Exactly. Drugs come from somewhere, and they're destroying our community, he says. You got folks like Brenda, who think they need them survive, and then you got the Khalils, who think they need to sell them to survive. The Brendas can't get jobs unless they're clean, and they can't pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That's the hate they're giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That's Thug Life.

One man's point of view?

This is exactly what They expect you to do, Momma says. They with a capital T. There's Them and then there's Us. Sometimes They look like Us and don't recognize They are Us.

In other words, you're liable to get it coming and going.

I’ve taught myself to speak with two different voices and only say certain things around certain people. I’ve mastered it.

For some though it's three or more.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles